Madelaine Frezza and Colin Marshall's Santa Barbara

Santa Barbara is small enough (90,000 city, 200,000 metro) that its
parking situation isn't particularly dire. I don't actually own a car,
so I lack first-hand knowledge of this, but it certainly seems
acceptable. Nevertheless, you can spot these little half-track-looking
things zipping around town all day long. The term "meter maids" is not,
alas, unwarranted: most of the Parking Enforcement officers who emerge
from them appear to be middle-aged women.

Is it their very
efforts that make the place so parkingly available, or are they
effectively just for show? These are the heated chicken-and-egg
discussions being hashed out in the Santa Barbara City Council even as
we speak. If you don't believe me, just watch City TV 18. Watch it, for I am
unable; I addition to lacking a car, I lack a television. (Got a rice
cooker, though.)

Already, I've no doubt given you the impression that this project is Santa Barbara in Lean Times. It's
really not, though I would submit that the correlation between a city's
continuous prosperity and its dullness is, shall we say, nonzero. The
Scottish musician and writer Nick "Momus" Currie has interesting things to say about this:

Increasingly, my outlook has
Berlinified, by which I mean I regard expensive cities like New York,
London and Tokyo as unsuited to subculture. They're essentially
uncreative because creative people living there have to put too much of
their time and effort into the meaningless hackwork which allows them
to meet the city's high rents and prices. So disciplines like graphic
design and television thrive, but more interesting types of art are
throttled in the cradle.

While Santa Barbara will never,
ever even approach the NYC/London/Tokyo population scale — even
proportionately — it has similar rents-and-prices issues. We call it the
"Santa Barbara Tax". Talking to a friend in Brooklyn, I found out that
Brooklyn is actually in some respects cheaper than here; the bars are,
anyway. When someone leaves Santa Barbara, it's usually because their
studio apartment went up to $1100 per month or because they found the
same job in like Bakersfield, but it pays three times as much. (These
are not exaggerations.)

Part of me thus roots for Santa Barbara
to get poorer. This is not particularly improbable in Economic Times
Like These; signs over signs like those pictured above are pretty
common. Things have improved since last year, when the frequency of
empty storefronts made stretches of State look like the mouth of a
Sportsman regular. Alas, I haven't seen many cool, interesting things
take root in the dead spots; if anything, the new arrivals are worse. I
see it as emblematic that Morninglory Music was replaced by some sort of
glow-in-the-dark t-shirt store.

But hope springs eternal! The
glow-in-the-dark t-shirt industry could always take a dive, making way
for the Ooga Boogas of the
world. Then let's convert Juicy Couture into a Kinokuniya or something,
please.